Butter, Revisited

"What do you blog about?" is a question I got asked a few times the other night. Well, um, stuff - life, food, parents, parenting, work, books - you know, stuff. And while food is in there, and is something I like to write about and think about, it's by no means the focal point of this here blog.

So, it was kind of a mystery to me to get an invitation a couple of weeks ago to attend a cooking class/cocktail party with Cat Cora - who I'd never before heard of. [I've heard of the Iron Chef program, but I've never watched it, so I don't know the participants.] But it was at a swank location, and they were offering car service, and I figured what the hell, it might be an amusing night out. I roped a friend into being my walker, and told them I'd be there.

Before I accepted the invitation, I tried googling to figure out what this might be about - the invitation called it "The BIG FAT Truth"chef dinner and made reference to a "secret ingredient".

Not until the day of the event did I figure out what the secret ingredient was, and what the party was likely to be about - it turns out that Cat Cora is shilling for Unilever's soft spreads, and the event was a kick-off for a new marketing campaign propping up the "right kind of fats".

It seems to me that the people in charge of the invitations didn't do much in the way of due diligence. If they had, they might have noticed that the very first post I ever wrote was about butter.

Whatever.

Peter and I swanned into a drop-dead beautiful loft-like duplex apartment, complete with two fireplaces, enormous kitchen, floor to ceiling bookshelves and a huge wrap-around terrace. The place was beautifully lit, the drinks were terrific, and the gorgeous flower arrangements were in plastic spread tubs.

Cat Cora did a brief demonstration - making vegetable dumplings by sauteing some broccoli slaw in melted soft spread, folding that into wonton skins, and basting them with more melted soft spread before it went into the oven. On the counter in front of her, there were cheese straws in a plastic spread tub.

The dumplings later appeared on trays as passed hors d'oeuvres - with their dipping sauce in plastic spread tubs.

At the end of the evening, they sent us home with a copy of Cat Cora's Cooking From the Hip - which looks like a perfectly nice cookbook, full of olive oil and butter, and not a trace of soft spread - as well as a card file containing lots of "myths" and "truths" and "lies" about butter and soft spreads, as well as recipes for all of the foods served at the party.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy it.

First of all, I'm thoroughly in the Michael Pollan camp - in this case, hewing to the avoid foods with unfamiliar, unpronounceable ingredients edict. Secondly, I like my food to taste good, and that stuff not only doesn't taste good, it leaves a weird coating in your mouth.

Butter tastes great. It has nice mouth feel. It's all natural - if you had a cow, you could make it yourself. Butter's been around for a really long time. Soft spread is a factory invention. Why would you want to ingest that? If you want to cut back on the fat in your diet, use less. If you want to lower your cholesterol and saturated fat intake, use olive oil.

I could go on and on, nitpicking through the press release and the recipe cards, poking holes in this and that. But I'm starting to feel churlish and, to be fair, the evening was fun in more than one respect: I got to hang with Peter, I met a couple of interesting, like-minded bloggers, and they were pouring a lovely crisp fat-free white wine.